Cattle Market

1818-1819 · Painting

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哈佛藝術博物館

剑桥, 美國

展厅2200, floor 2, European and American Art, 17th–19th century

正对公众展出。由谁担保，见下文。

核实: 9天前
此状态始于: 2026年9月27日
出处: 博物馆

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关于这幅画

While studying ancient and Renaissance art in Italy, Géricault took an interest in the scenes of everyday Italian life. In this painting, made after his return to France, he fuses those influences in a depiction of a Roman cattle market, where three men round up the animals for slaughter. Borrowing a practice from Roman reliefs, Géricault pushes the herdsmen, dogs, and cattle into the foreground. He renders them in a similar brushstroke and palette, blurring the distinction between man and beast and creating a stark contrast with the serene landscape in the background to highlight the violent turmoil of their encounter. Géricault painted this composition to various degrees of finish, leaving the underdrawing bare in the hoof of the gray bull, for example, which rests precipitously on the edge of a cylindrical stone.

哈佛藝術博物館

作品信息

馆藏编号: 1943.242

与此同时，在Théodore Géricault的生活中

完整生平

1816–1817
Naples and Rome: the shock of Michelangelo
Géricault visited Naples, drawing the landscapes and people, but spent most of his time in Rome. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel shook him: Michelangelo's monumentality of form inspired his pen drawings, such as “Man Felling a Bull”, among the most interesting made in Rome.
autumn 1817
The book on the wreck of the Méduse reaches Géricault
In the autumn of 1817 the book “The Wreck of the Frigate Medusa” appeared, in which the eyewitnesses, the geographer-engineer Alexandre Corréard and the physician Henri Savigny, described the thirteen-day drift of the raft after the ship ran aground off the coast of Mauritania. The book reached Géricault, who saw in it the subject for the large painting he had long dreamed of.
1817–1818
Investigating the disaster: survivors, a model raft, morgues
Géricault re-created the event by studying the available materials and meeting witnesses: he got to know Corréard and Savigny, a carpenter from the Méduse made a scale model of the raft for him, and the artist modelled wax figures himself. He visited hospital morgues, drawing dead heads, emaciated bodies and severed limbs, and the preparation ended with a trip to Le Havre, where he painted studies of sea and sky.
1819
“The Raft of the Medusa” sparks a political controversy at the Salon
When first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, “The Raft of the Medusa” ignited political controversy: it indicted a corrupt establishment, in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die, but also dramatized the eternal struggle of man against nature.